Hope of a Nameless Many
by helva2260
Summary: At the end of Season 2, Angel was pulled into a hell dimension by the demon Acathla. At the beginning of Season 3, Buffy visited a demon dimension to rescue some kidnapped human runaways. This is what happened in the background that links the two stories.


Author's Note: This story came from a plotbunny stirred up by the Buffy Season 3 episode "Anne". When I saw the huge statue in the background of the demon dimension she visited, I just wondered why it was there... and whether it had anything to do with the dimension that Acathla pulled Angel into.   
  
  
** Hope Of A Nameless Many    
  
by helva2260   
  
  
Chapter One: In the Beginning... **   
  
  
  
There was a statue of an angel in Hell.   
  
It stretched high above the toiling ranks of humans in a macabre parody of crucifixion, feet bound together, arms and wings spread wide. It wasn't just a statue though, it was an instrument of torture - and the beaten people below dreaded the days they heard it scream and saw the blood flowing down its stoney grey sides.   
  
The statue was a message to the despairing and the hopeless that worked in this place of terror. A message they would not be permitted to forget. It said, "Abandon hope."   
  
But on this day, there was a rumour of hope that spread nervously in the tiny pauses between back-breaking work periods and the whip-cracks of the demon overseers. It was a repeated whisper of the chief overseer's incredulous cry,   
  
"Humans don't fight! Humans don't fight!"   
  
The rumour told of a human newly brought to the dimension as part of the periodic refreshment of the worker population. She had broken free, fought and killed many of the overseers, and then she had escaped, taking the surviving members of the new worker group back to the human world where time ran slower and people were free.   
  
It was a world only legendary for most of those living here, hell-born and bred, the descendants of those who had built the statue three thousand years before, after a series of holes between worlds opened in a straight line running from a mansion on Crawford Street, Sunnydale, to the San Andreas fault beyond Los Angeles. They had been born knowing they were no-one, as had their parents and their parents' parents since the first overseers tricked their ancestors. Even in their furtive moments of almost-rebellion, when they passed on the rumour of the young girl with death in her eyes and a smile on her lips, they still did not presume to think of themselves as anyone. But the story of the girl who had refused to be no-one, who had claimed back her name in front of the overseers and defeated them, began to join older tales passed down through many generations.   
  


----*---- 

  
  
In the cramped and twisted compartment in the trunk of the statue, there was one who did not hear the rumour.   
  
He still looked human; it pleased them to keep him that way, even as they played with his mind to make him more animal than man. And as long as they didn't get carried away, the results of more physical "games" would always heal without a trace.   
  
Sometimes, in the darkness, he hallucinated. Of other places, other times; the voices and faces of the people he knew and loved. Terrible things that he couldn't have done, wouldn't have done, but still remembered doing. Of things he had done, and things he had seen. The desperate pain in the eyes of the girl he loved as she thrust a gleaming silver sword through his heart.   
  
He could barely remember her name, but he held onto it like a talisman along with the fading memory of her face, in the cool of the dark when they left him alone. It was the one thing he had left. He had finally forgotten his own name several centuries before, although in some part of his mind he knew there was a reason why they kept bringing him back to this place, when they weren't hauling him around the myriad domains of this dimension for the entertainment of whoever or whatever's turn it was this time. The only other thing he remembered from his former life was that humans weren't for feeding on.   
  
It made no difference; there were no rats in Hell.   
  
He would have starved if his tormentors had let him, but they just waited until he was too weak with pain and hunger to resist, before they brought in an expendable human for his consumption. It was a powerful torture in itself, and they knew it; the mingled guilt, terror and impotent rage driving his shrinking sense of self slightly further into retreat every time.   
  


----*---- 

  
  
An old man, his hair and pores blackened by the thick smoke of the forges, tripped and fell when the boot of an overseer shot out in front of him. The crack of his thin wrist as he put out his hand to catch himself was audible to several of the closer demons, who smiled, enjoying the sudden scent of pain that joined the usual clinging odour of fear and barely contained exhaustion. The other humans carried on with their tasks - if they were wanted, they'd be told, or dragged away from their lines.   
  
Humans were graded into three categories here: immature, useful and useless. Some of the useless ones were pushed back through the hole between worlds. Most were not.   
  
A whiplash scarred the cheek of an adolescent boy, tall and gawky in the rags of his clothes, who dared to whisper "Goodbye" to the old man.   
  
Two overseers converged on the huddled figure of the old man shakily trying to get to his feet. They pulled him upright roughly, and began pushing him towards one of the many exits on that level. Every shove from a demonic hand on his shoulder jolted his injured arm with its limp appendage, but the old man bore the pain with as much dignity as he could manage. There was little else you could call your own, so it was always preferable to die with dignity, though even that was at the whim of the overseers.   
  



End file.
